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Solar energy is becoming more cost effective and affordable to build. It's easy to maintain and renewable energy's continues to be an appealing option especially on the plains. OCI Solar Power is extending Project Ivy installi…

Solar energy is becoming more cost effective and affordable to build. It's easy to maintain and renewable energy's continues to be an appealing option especially on the plains. OCI Solar Power is extending Project Ivy installing 197,000 solar modules on the southeast part of town. It covers about 380 acres and will service 35,000 homes.

"It's a twenty five year plan that will be in operations," said Raymond Selves, field operations manager with RES. "Its good consistent renewable, clean energy, that we need."

After a successful first phase, Lamesa One, OCI Solar and RES Renewable Energy Systems Americas decided to expand their operations. This new renewable energy option is expected to bring new economic opportunities for the city of Lamesa.

"It brought in about a 100 people to construct the solar panels and that has been up and going for a while," said Sandra Adams, president of the Lamesa Chamber of Commerce "Now we are in phase two and we are excited about that bringing in another 100 people."

For small towns like Lamesa, big projects like this one also brings hope to its residents, phase two of this solar panel project will begin next month and is expected to finish by the end of this year.

When the caller said he worked for Harry Reid and the former Senate majority leader wanted a word, Dale Ross assumed it was a joke. “OK, which of my buddies are messing with me today?” he wondered.

He shouldn’t have been so surprised. Ross is the mayor of Georgetown, population 65,000, and he has become a minor celebrity in environmental circles as a result of a pioneering decision in 2015 to get all the city’s electricity from renewable sources.

Georgetown’s location in oil-and-gas-centric Texas and Ross’s politics add to the strangeness of the tale. The mayor is a staunch Republican at a time when a Republican president – and his Environmental Protection Agency administrator – reject the scientific consensus on climate change and are trying to revive the declining coal industry.

Ross has appeared in a National Geographic documentary, a forthcoming film about clean energy for HBO directed by James Redford (son of Robert) and in this year’s follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth, which saw the advocate and former vice-president Al Gore visit Georgetown.

The day after we met at city hall, just off Georgetown’s charming main square, Ross was set to fly to Utah to introduce a screening of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Then it was on to Las Vegas to reunite with Gore, a fellow speaker at Friday’s National Clean Energy Summit, an event co-hosted by Reid, a Democrat from Nevada. Next week, a conference in Oakland, California. Next month, a green energy panel in Nova Scotia.

“You should see the fan mail that I get, especially with the movies,” Ross grinned. The 58-year-old said the decision to follow the lead of Burlington, Vermont – the first US city to run solely on renewable energy – was not the product of liberal do-gooder vapours wafting up Interstate 35 from nearby Austin. It was based on cold-eyed pragmatism, the fruit of the kind of careful numerical analysis he performs in his day job as a certified public accountant.

“The revolution is here,” he said. “And I’m a good little Republican, a rightwing fiscal conservative, but when it comes to making decisions based on facts, that’s what we do.”

The facts, Ross said, are that when Georgetown negotiated power supply deals the cost was about the same between natural gas and wind and solar, but the natural gas option would provide only a seven-year guaranteed contract whereas 20-25 year proposals were on the table from renewable providers.

Prices in the city, Ross said, have declined from 11.4¢ per kilowatt hour in 2008 to 8.5¢ this year. Georgetown sources most of its power from a wind farm 500 miles away in Amarillo and will get solar energy from a farm in west Texas that is expected to be finished next June, meaning the city can attain its 100% renewable goal even when the wind isn’t blowing. This year, Ross said, the tally is about 90%, down from 100% in 2016.

“I think it’s a big step for Texas, for Georgetown,” said Christian Soeffker, who runs a toy shop on the square. “We just like the idea of being in a town that is in some ways special because we’ve got all that green energy.”

Georgetown makes headlines not only because so few US cities run entirely on renewables, but because it has a conservative mayor willing to make compromises and fraternise with high-profile Democrats in a hyper-partisan era where climate change is one of the most divisive subjects.

“How is anybody going to compete with wind and solar?” said Ross, who has ordered an electric-powered BMW scooter from California and plans to fit solar panels at his home and office.

All the same, he voted for coal’s biggest champion in last November’s presidential election – Trump was “like, my eighth or ninth choice” in the primary, he said – and went to his inauguration, which he said was “phenomenal”, even if it cost $700 for a basic hotel room. His support is not unquestioning, though.

“When Trump was campaigning he was talking about clean coal and we’re going to bring coal jobs back? That is a mirage, that is not going to happen,” he said. “Coal is one of the most expensive forms of fossil fuels to produce. And those jobs are never going to come back, ever. They’re done.”

As for any policies the federal government might enact to boost the coal industry, such as the decision announced on Tuesday to scrap the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan?

“Isn’t that sort of like putting a Band-Aid on somebody that has terminal cancer?” Ross said. “I’m not the smartest guy in the room but it’s not that complicated, OK? How’s fossil fuels going to compete in the next five years? They’re not going to be able to compete.”

‘We have so much that is ideal for solar’

Texas is the US leader in wind energy capacity, even as many of its politicians maintain absolute fealty to fossil fuels that are a key economic driver and still the supplier of most of the state’s electricity. It has lagged behind other states in solar capacity but is starting to realise its potential.

“We have so much area in Texas that’s ideal for solar,” said Joey Romano, a 35-year-old with a small solar farm 50 miles west of downtown Houston. “Solar and wind, unsubsidised, today already can compete with coal,” he said.

Local Sun has about 100 residential customers. Completed at the end of 2015, the farm is located in a rural county that gave Trump 79% of the vote. But Romano said local officials recognised the potential for jobs and revenue and were happy to help the project get off the ground. Beehives stand among the 15,000 panels.

Local Sun is a boutique operation in partnership with MP2 Energy, a retail company owned by Shell, and it is designed to attract those willing to pay a small premium for an eco-conscious local product, much as food shoppers might spend a little more for organic groceries.

However modest, its very existence feels like a significant marker in a city that is known as America’s oil and gas capital but is in fact the nation’s biggest municipal user of green power.

On the other hand, environmental activists worry that solar’s growth will be stunted in Texas and across the country if, as appears likely, the Trump White House imposes prohibitive tariffs on imported solar panels.

“They may harm thousands of installation jobs in favour of a few hundred manufacturing jobs, so that could hurt,” said Jim Marston of the Environmental Defense Fund, who believes renewable energy will thrive even if federal incentives end and barriers are erected.

“You can’t stop the technology. It’s too good, the prices are too good, and people want it,” he said.

Ross agrees that market forces will prevail. On Friday, the day of the clean energy summit, Texas’s largest electricity producer announced it would close two more coal-fuelled power plants in the state.

Luminant cited challenging economic conditions including low wholesale and natural gas prices and the growth of renewables. A week earlier, the company said that in January it will retire a large coal-powered plant in east Texas.

“We were on the frontier of the fossil fuel business, oil and gas,” Ross said. “And now Texas again is on the frontier of the new energy that’s going to be the future.”

RES is pleased to announce that it has been placed 55th in the Sunday Times HSBC Top Track 100 which ranks Britain's 100 private companies with the biggest sales. Other recognisable names on the list include Southern Water, Biffa and Monarch Airlines…

RES is pleased to announce that it has been placed 55th in the Sunday Times HSBC Top Track 100 which ranks Britain's 100 private companies with the biggest sales. Other recognisable names on the list include Southern Water, Biffa and Monarch Airlines.

Ian Mays, CEO at RES commented on the award: “It’s great to be placed on the prestigious Sunday Times HSBC Top Track 100 list. This is testament to the hard work of the team here at RES and shows just how far we have come since the foundation of the company in 1982. I’m pleased that we remain at the forefront of renewable energy provision, helping the transition to a low-carbon power system”.

“We now operate in 13 countries around the world and our diversification into new technologies such as Energy Storage and Demand Side Management will only help the company continue to grow”.

For more information on the Sunday Times HSBC Top Track 100, please visit: